Jen Liu
Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Gold Loop
4K video, 4-channel sound, 28 minutes, 2020–21 © the artist
The video reflects on the disappearance of labor activists in China, the resulting possibilities of political resistance, and e-waste (old computers, cell phones, etc.). Firsthand accounts of female electronics workers in South China are cut together with corporate and industrial texts in order to investigate the physical, legal, and biochemical realities of gold extraction from e-waste. Live action video and animation explore the psycho-geography of "virtuous" first-world recycling vs third-world bio-political devastation. Themes of mirroring, mutation, and disintegration are grounded in considering electronics that poison bodies in their initial production as well as in their return for disassembly, an infernal eternal return, a “gold loop.”
This video was shot in Dishui Lake District, China (artificial land-reclamation project with circular manmade lake in the center), and Birmingham, UK (Millennium Point redevelopment area).
Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, dance performance, and biomaterial, on topics of national identity, economy, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Grant, a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and was a 2017 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video and NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Art. She has presented work at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, and The New Museum, New York; Royal Academy and ICA in London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; the Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, Leon; as well as the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and the 2019 Singapore Biennial. She has received multiple grants and residencies, including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Sommerakademie, Bern; de ateliers, Amsterdam, NL; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, LMCC, Pioneer Works, and ISCP in New York.
